Educating Tomorrow’s Innovators

Design News recently published an article, Inspiring Today’s Students to Become Tomorrow’s Innovators. We originally shared this article on our 3D Innovations Twitter account (@3D_Innovations) and we were surprised by the number of people that then shared this article with their own followers, so we wanted to be sure that our blog community also had the chance to read it.

Below is a powerful excerpt from the article (and we must say that we agree with the author’s conclusion):

For science and engineering, the inspiration is there — SpaceX is launching rockets to space, CERN is creating the world’s largest particle accelerator, and projects such as North American Eagle are working to break the world land speed record.

But while students can see these engineering marvels, most never get exposed to how they work or have the opportunity to build one of their own. In fact, students rarely get to participate in activities where they actually do engineering.

Unfortunately, our society and education system bombards our students with lectures, rote memorization, theory, and math throughout their education. Even in college, most only get exposed to computer simulations and programming in Java or mathematics algorithms. This lack of hands-on experience for students is driving our future innovators away in droves. And for those who stay, they graduate with no real-world experience.

Employers expect the students of today to be prepared for the jobs of tomorrow — even the ones that don’t exist today. Is that a fair expectation if we’ve never given our students a chance to do engineering?

I believe to answer industry demands for job-ready graduates, we must create an educational continuum that parallels the progression of learning to play an instrument or riding a bike and create products that grow with students from kindergarten to rocket science.